AWS new I3en Meganode – Bigger Nodes for Bigger Data

AWS has introduced the I3en family of instances, designed to provide an optimal solution for storage-intensive workloads by offering up to 60TB of fast NVMe storage, thereby addressing the limitations faced by the I3 family in terms of disk-to-CPU ratio. This new family features Xeon Platinum 8175M processors, which are faster and have more cores than their I3 counterparts, and utilizes the Nitro KVM-based hypervisor, enhancing performance for I/O-driven tasks. The I3en.24xlarge instance, the largest in the family, showcases impressive performance metrics, including 100Gbps networking and high IOPS rates, making it suitable for demanding applications such as ScyllaDB, which can effectively utilize these resources to handle a 45TB dataset with millions of data point ingestions per second and low latency reads. This advancement offers AWS users greater flexibility and cost-effectiveness when selecting instances based on storage needs, providing a lower price per terabyte of data while maintaining competitive processing capabilities.